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[news.eclipse.technology.ecomm] Re: questions on the proposal 
Hi Jeff,

Here are some quick answers to your questions. These answers aren't etched in stone, of course. Your input about everything is most welcome.

Jeff McAffer wrote:
This looks good. Some questions/thoughts on the technical direction. From the proposal...

2. Interoperability through Open, Layered, Replaceable Protocols
Q: Which protocols are you considering?

At least: JMS, JavaGroups, some work by team members, possibly JXTA and Jabber. Also extension point-provided support for use of commercial/proprietary protocols for interoperability with existing systems...e.g. sametime, aim, others.


3. Flexible Security: Identity/Authentication, Encryption, and Authorization
T: This is very interesting. In Equinox we have been trying to get security work going for a while but with relatively little success. It seems a critical mass is forming. We will be very interested in what you do in this space.

I/we would very much like to remain connected to the Equinox/OSGI work here. The potential for security 'non-starters' is much greater, of course, with components that could arrive/install/depart via a real-time group messaging infrastructure rather than an explicit user install. Ideally, the 'local' component model and the 'distributed component' model would have/leverage the same or similar platform-provided security mechanisms.


4. End-to-end System Scalability
Q: What does this cover?

1) Scalability of all network elements...clients,peers/servers/proxy servers, etc. 2) Scaling to potentially large numbers of simultaneous users, 3) with many users all potentially generating a lot of traffic (e.g. conferencing). I believe that 1 and 3 are higher priority than 2, but that's IMHO.


5. Application Extensibility
Q: What does this cover?

Well, in my view, it covers the ability to dynamically load and install new distributed applications and peer-provided services. It also could mean the ability to dynamically distribute a team 'model'...e.g. and EMF model that is created/manipulated by multiple Eclipse clients 'simultaneously'.


6. Component Architecture Leveraging the OSGI Model
Q: Very interested here. What parts of OSGi do you see as interesting/useful?

There's some thought to be done here...with your/Equinox help...but I think it might be possible to define a 'distributed' bundle container. Including some notion of bundle replication.


7. System Provisioning, Monitoring, and Manageability
T: OSGi has formed a Mobile Experts Group which is dealing with a number of these issues mostly for the embedded (phone, telematics, ...) environment. Looking at OMA etc. I'm nto sure what they have made available publicly but you may want to watch that space. 

OK, will do.



Questions:
- The proposal includes "all ecomm-created code will be built to depend only upon pure Java Standard Edition (1.4+).". This is cool as an ultimate upper bound but you realy should consider some lower bars as well. For example, we are looking at moving to Foundation for the Eclipse RCP plugins.

Yes, this is a good idea. It should be possible/very doable for us, as long as we are careful to keep the platform requirements low for the core communications/messaging frameworks. I don't think this will be a problem, actually. Perhaps we should shoot for Foundation as well...hmmm.

This
allows for smaller total download/disk footprint as well as running on devices such as handhelds and phones (see the eRCP project for a hint at that direction).

- Is there code available? Milestone 1 is almost here and it calls for APIs and apps to be delivered.

There is some candidate code that I/Composent will make available. I have developed 3 infrastructure plugins and 1 real-time collaboration application with Eclipse UIs, and the team will decide how much rework/redesign/extension to make on these plugins before redesigning/checking things in for this project.

If you are interested in examining this work you can try it out and look at the APIs/source if you wish.

http://composent.com/plugin/

Regrettably, the docs are very incomplete, but I'm focusing on ecomm rather than taking this work forward for Composent...and up until now I've been the only person working on this code/plugins.

Jeff please let me know if you want an online demo. I'm a regular user of these 'collaboration projects' and can create a user account just for you so you don't have to use 'guest' accounts.

Also let me know if you would like to get access to the cvs projects for these plugins.


Sorry for putting all these in one message. I didn't want to flood the group with a mess of separate messages as I suspect others will have a similar set after reading the proposal.

No problem. I agree the proposal doesn't (yet) detail things...we're just getting going. The opportunity to clarify and receive feedback from others is very good. I would like to make this a very open project.

Thanks. Please let me know directly (at slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) if you would like demos or source access, etc.

Scott